Society as Organism

The following is essentially a restatement of Hegel's views on society modulated through my own metaphysical views (which are, themselves, heavily influenced by Hegel).

The relation of people to society or each other can likewise often be thought of as an external relation. Each individual is thought of as a unit, in principle independent of others, free to define him or herself however he or she chooses. This lies behind our notion of how democracy should operate, the capitalist notion of freedom of exchange, and much of our obsession with personal freedoms.

Let me try to trace the ligaments of this a little more. On this model, each person is ontologically independent of others. One is who one is solely because of one's own decisions. Perhaps, of course, one's environment has shaped one, one's particular body has given one certain skills or impediments, but none of this is supposed to come into who one is. One is supposed to be externally related to all of these factors. You are supposed to be an individual, independent of your past. In principle, then, who you are cannot be essentially related to your community or any other obviously contingent facts about one's concrete existence. You must be free, then, to create yourself--and, indeed, reality--however you like.

But your creation is your own creation. It is therefore distinct from that of others, even unique. No one can understand the real you because you are not accessible through the cultural medium you express yourself in. Any mode of expression must be felt as inadequate because it expresses one as in a particular culture in a particular time, not as a free and independent individual. One thus inevitably becomes lonely, since one cannot express oneself in a manner which will feel adequate to one's self conception, and thus one cannot feel known in one's expression.

There are two attitudes one may take to these individuals. They may be basically good or basically bad. In the former case, restrictions on expression must be bad, and must therefore be done away with. In the latter case, the individuals must be restrained from hurting themselves. Generally, the view will be mixed, but this only means that the individuals will be treated as alternately a source of good potential to be harnessed and a danger to be restrained. The relation of government to people will thus be felt as that of regulation. There will be only either the imposition of restraints, whether for our own good or not, and the removal of such restraints, either for our good or to our harm.

Once we are independent individuals, we lose the communal ties which bound us together and provided a rich web of connections such that we could discuss issues civilly with other whom we respected independently of the particular issues. Overlapping communities provided ways of expressing ourselves which others in those communities could understand, but depended on the assumption that culturally situated modes of expression could adequately express us. As individuals, we seem to have lost that belief. We experience ourselves as beyond our cultures.

Still, however we may act, we are related to each other internally. I mentioned some about how men and women are internally related, although I cannot flesh that out thoroughly. We are also internally related to society in that our ways of experiencing the world are picked up from others. We understand ourselves in relation to others or not at all. We cannot find ourselves without recognizing ourselves in the world. This is way going out into the world to find oneself is such a strange idea. You are far more likely to discover who you are by examining how you came to views you hold, by tracing the threads which make up your life, and by acknowledging your socially situated perspective. This need not make one less confident of one's views, although it should make one a little more circumspect about rejecting others' views out of hand, but should rather give one a greater ability to articulate what draws one to one's views, what fallacies one might be making, and thus make one more confident that one has thought through one's views well.

Because we are internally related to others in society we are stuck with group affiliations, however much we may deny them. These groups metastasize into factions and oppose each other because each claims to be independent. Each faction wants to be seen as made up simply of free independent people who think rightly. Neither faction, therefore, can stand the other. This results in something like war, where neither side can recognize the other as right thinking, but winds up dehumanizing the other.

I have already said something about how thinking of ourselves as internally related to society and to each other may work itself out, but let me develop it a bit more. First off, we should think of society on the model of an organism, rather than on the model of a contract of people. This is a rather biblical notion of society, in that the Bible expresses often that the Church is a body made of many members who perform different functions. In society, too, there are many sorts of people, and not all have the same talents and skills. Not all have the same cultural background. If we want genuine diversity, we will need to find some way to allow for cultural situatedness to have a substantial role in society, to be validated. Hegel works this out be arguing for a form of government where different kinds of workers have different relations to government. I doubt that would be quite right. What I find intriguing, however, is his idea that each group, rather than geographical locale, should be represented. The details of how this might work today are, however, obscure.

The notion of society as an organism should help us discuss issues which disproportionately affect one class or one kind of worker. By articulating how our nation holds together organically, we can start to picture why all of the nation should care about parts of the nation, and thereby help move us to a place where we all care what other groups think, rather than hiding away in our own groups which we deny are groups.

Legitimacy and Responsiveness

In the context of the free will debate, Fisher and Ravizza use a concept of reasons responsiveness to account for when an action is performed freely. I want to apply a similar account to the legitimacy of actions performed by government entities.

On a reasons-responsive view of freedom, an action is performed freely only if it is caused by a mechanism that is somewhat responsive to reasons. This concept of "being responsive" needs to be spelled out more, however. The strongest way would be to say that an agent performs an action freely only if they would have done something else in any situation where there was good reason to do otherwise and not good reason to perform the action. This is likely too strong, however. For one, it requires an agent to be omniscient as to what the reasons are (at least, on reasons externalism). Alternatively, we could hold that the agent performs the action freely only if the action is performed via a mechanism which might have produced a different action in some close situations where there was good reason to do otherwise.

My aim here is to use a similar notion to account for the legitimacy of government actions. I take it that, to be legitimate, the government action needs to be responsive to the values of the people it governs. The values of those people should be responsive to reasons, of course, but that might not be required for the legitimacy of the government. The government action must be performed through a mechanism which usually produces actions as if motivated by the values of the people it governs.

There is a problem here, of course: how do we aggregate the diverse values of a populous? I am not sure there has to be just one answer to this question. It is open to a government to weight different values differently, provided that the weightings, in turn, are motivated by the values of the citizenry. So the aggregation scheme must be such that it provides the result that it is legitimate. Further, it should count all the citizens. It is possible for it to weight the values of some values differently than others, although this should be motivated by values regarding whose values are expected to be the most accurate, rather than which class is preferred. The limit here is provided by the threat of citizens regarding the government as ignoring them. When this occurs, it is safe to say, that government has failed to be sufficiently responsive.

This may be because it is impossible to be responsive to the values of the whole citizenry, or it may be due to failure to attend to the values of some group and take seriously the concerns of that group. In either case, there is a failure of society, a failure of the state as social body to maintain its unity. At such points, the government becomes either a tyranny of one group over another, it splits into two governments, or it finds some way to satisfy both parties, e.g., by ensuring that members of both groups have a role with some degree of efficacy in the government, so that both groups are confident that they are having a say. All of these are attempts at preserving at least a veneer of legitimacy. A government becomes illegitimate in the first case alone. In the other two cases, the legitimacy is repaired. My claim, then, is that a state becomes illegitimate only when it regularly fails to take the values of the whole citizenry into consideration, and thus where a mass of the citizenry has a long-standing sense of disenfranchisement, whatever their legal situation may be.

This is the root of representative democracies. A representative democracy is an attempt at ensuring that the government is responsive to the values of the citizenry. It is possible to maintain this level of legitimacy in non-democratic systems, however, and it is possible to impose a democratic system which fails to be legitimate precisely because it is democratic. The latter case would occur, for instance, if one tried to impose democracy somewhere where people believed that it was a terrible system of government. The former case would occur where a king, for instance, truly cared about his people and considered their values and well-being in his decisions (as, e.g., will be the case in the divine government in heaven).

Contractualist Politics

Contractualism is probably the dominant account of political legitimacy currently. Let me sketch what it is, why I claim it is dominant, and why that is a problem.

A contractualist account of political legitimacy holds that a government is an implicit contract of all citizens to give up some rights to get others to do likewise and to gain certain rights. It supposes that there can be no (political) justice or injustice unless some entity with authority dictates laws. It also supposes that no entity can have such authority unless we the people grant it such authority. It operates with the point of view that there is a default state, or state of nature, which we are trying to avoid, and thus that we contract together to solve the problems of that default state. What the government can do, therefore, is limited by what we can suppose individuals would let it do in order to get out of the default state. If the situation in the government is worse than the default state, then the people cannot be supposed to have authorized it, and thus the government must be illegitimate.

The default state is generally viewed as a state where each person is alone, where it is one's own effort and labor by which one survives. Whether the contract is formed for security against aggressors or for the benefits of division of labor, the contract is what first brings people into communities. Even Rawls's veil of ignorance has each individual considering what the best situation would be for one, not knowing what social location or what talents or abilities one might have.

The strongest versions will form a multilayered structure where only the most basic elements rely on a contract of everyone with everyone, and thus preclude such anarchistic tendencies as suggested by "not my president." For instance, our own government relies for its authority on the constitution. Nevertheless, if we the people established the constitution, then we the people can revoke it, and secession is easier than accession. To establish the constitution one needs a critical mass of people to form a citizenry. To disestablish it, one must merely lose such a mass. Of course, what keeps a constitutionalist government going, on its own account, is that everyone hopefully prefers it to the alternative. How long one can keep that up depend on what people take the alternative to be and how people feel about how things are going under the government.

The United States is founded on contractualist political philosophy: the preamble to our constitution is explicit that "We the people of the United States...do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The revolution was based on the premise that the people have a right to revolt against a government which is not providing for the citizens' improvement beyond the default condition, but which is rather, as it was viewed, merely using the citizens for its own benefit. The colonists held that they could improve on the default condition better than Mother England, and so, in virtue of that fact and the failure of the existing government, held that they had a right and even a duty to rebel and instate a government which would be truly legitimate. This same attitude recurs when we hear "not my president," claims that because the taxes are unfair one needn't feel bad about cheating on them, or see individuals speeding because others are doing so and they can get away with it. If the government is not succeeding at improving on the default condition, and if it is failing to secure my rights, then the rights I gave up for that security may be retained.

There are two big problems with this view: the notion of a default state and the account of legitimacy are both problematic. They both play into an individualistic view of authority and persons.

The problem with the notion of the default state is that there is no sense that one might rightly uphold a government because it is one's own. This may be an unfair critique of Rawls, insofar as what the veil of ignorance is supposed to establish is the shape of justice, which is the end point, not where we are quite expected to be now. Rawls has been critiqued in this way before, by those who see his establishment of the goal as prior to figuring out how to get there as problematic, but that is not the present point. The present point is that contractualist views of political legitimacy encourage one to judge any present government for failing to achieve justice. They occlude the importance of our present situation for any analysis of what we should do now. Rawls can grant that the question of how to reach justice may be a difficult one requiring an analysis of present social realities. What Rawls occludes is how our view of what we would see from behind the veil of ignorance is always situated in our society. We can never get fully behind the veil, because we are already situated in some society which has formed us to value some things over others. Even our account of who goes behind the curtain or what counts as a social location is modified by who we take to count as a citizen. How disabled, how young, and how old can one be and still count?

The account of legitimacy is likewise problematic. Because we are situated already in a society, we do not, in the ordinary course of things, consider ourselves the source of the legitimacy of the government. We do not, contrary to what contract theorists originally hoped, view the government as legislating on our behalf such that the law is decreed by us by proxy. Rather, we view the government either as doing well or doing poorly, promoting the welfare of society or not. The legitimacy of the government appears to be secured by the government's attitude toward the governed. Thus, the justice of revolt arises, not because the citizenry can do better or because the default state would be better, but because the government does not take the citizenry into account in its deliberations. It is the alienation of the citizenry from the government, and not the failure of the government per se, which delegitimatizes the government. What is accurate about contractualism is that citizens ought to see their interests represented in the legislation, and not merely interests of the state as such or interests of other institutions (although such will be brought in via the interests of the citizenry). The requirement that it be an equal contract is accurate in that the interests of the whole citizenry ought to be represented in legislation, not simply the powerful citizens.

But what I am suggesting is right about the legitimation scheme of contractualism is a different account of legitimation. The source of legitimacy is no longer the consent of the citizenry, but the success of the government as a government, where a government is not defined as a group of contracting individuals, but as providing order and protection to a group of interested social agents, who are situated in a society which is already under way, in a way consonant with how those agents and that society is.

We can also view these two problems from a theological standpoint. The authority of the rulers and authorities of this world is derived from God's authority. The legitimacy of a government is ultimately a matter of its fulfilling God's purpose for government. Where contractualism makes our collective purposes the standard for good government and the source of its authority, we must affirm that, viewed theologically, it is God's purposes which matter and he is the source of all authority. Contractualism--I suggest, recognizing that there is room for push-back--is a political philosophy which views the citizenry as a god, catering to our idolatrous hearts.

Freedom

I have not posted anything about free will recently, so here I intend to sketch an account of freedom which is compatible with determinism. Before I get into that, however, let me explain the point of compatibilism with respect to free will and determinism. The point is not that I think the world is determined, though it may be, nor that I am afraid that it might be. I would be a compatibilist with respect to free will and determinism even if I were convinced that the world was indeterministic. The point is to articulate what free will depends on, what the concept of free will amounts to, or what kinds of free will are possible. A compatibilist, such as myself, holds that whether or not the universe is deterministic should not make a difference to whether or not we are free.

Free will is a vague term, and can be used in different ways. Ordinarily, I understand it as whatever choice-relevant factor is required for moral responsibility. One can also understand it to refer to the prerequisite for a being determining its own choices. I will need to do some work in a moment to clarify this second type.

Take freedom as prerequisite for moral responsibility first. If this is all freedom is, then an account of moral responsibility which makes clear whether any of its elements presuppose indeterminacy will answer the question of whether free will is compatible with determinism. My account has it that moral responsibility arises from the ability to consider other points of view on a decision. The only element here that seems likely to require indeterminacy is that it is an ability. So the next step here would be to provide an analysis of (particularly unexercised) ability which is compatible with determinism.

Now take freedom as self-determination. If freedom is self-determination, then when a being performs an action freely in this sense, the freedom of that being has the final say on whether the being performs that action. This need not mean that no other factors are involved, and clearly must be compatible with the being doing things for reasons. Hegel's account of freedom lies in this kind, where he suggests that a being is free if it does all it does from itself, not determined by anything outside itself. The notion of "outside itself" at work here is not, however, a physical one. It is a matter of appropriating or incorporating things into oneself. Thus, one can be free in this sense in a deterministic world so long as one finds oneself--sees one's own values and so on--in what determines one. To put it another way, one would be free so long as one can say "Amen" to all that determines one in its manner of determining one--if one is glad to be determined in the way one is.

Autonomy and Economics

One imagines a state-run economy and a laissez-faire economy as opposed. One aims for the utmost regulation, the other for none at all. Both extremes aim at the same end, however: that the economy exhibit the values of the people. This end requires two things: that the values of the people appear in the economy, and that they do so because of how the people express themselves in the economy. Each extreme fails to achieve one of these two criteria.

A state-run economy would be one where the state ensured that certain values appeared in the economy, that certain items were valued more, others less, and that resources circulated in precise accord with the acknowledged values. Because the appearance of the values is guaranteed by the state, however, the connection to people's expression of their values in the economy is voided. The closest connection to the values of individuals one could possibly obtain would be if the people voted on how to set up the economy, but this would not represent the values of the people as economic agents.

A laissez-faire economy, however, while ensuring that the economic actions of individuals is what determines what values are represented in the economy, fails to ensure that the values represented are those expressed. The economy easily loses the ability to represent nuance in the evaluative views of consumers, and tends to represent extreme views. Some individuals lack the buying power to express their values beyond the value which a low cost has, others find that certain values are represented so extremely in certain areas that, though other values are a factor, those other values never make a difference in what they buy. The represented values thus skew in two directions: cheap and toward the values of the rich. Only in places where the cost is low and further values are brought in to the mix to differentiate products can the poorer classes of society have an economic vote in the values represented.

The political divide with respect to economics, it seems to me, runs roughly on these lines. Both sides seek the same aim. The left focuses on the end product: what values the economy represents; the right focuses on the process: the ability of economic transactions to have an effect on the values which the economy represents. By dividing in this way, both leave out a concern that all individuals have an equal economic vote. Neither focuses on the dignity of economic agents as such. The right fears that regulations will keep them from expressing themselves economically. The left fears that deregulation will allow disproportionate impact by the rich and powerful.

As an aside: there is something very Hegelian about the way in which the left and the right seem to be identical, just in different domains. Here the right, rather than the left, is obsessed with self-expression at any cost.

The point of this post is to show where the conflict lies. By seeing that both aim at the same end, we locate a shared point of reference with respect to which we can argue about particular views. I am not confident about any particular solution (I am not an economist), but an excellent solution would be one which clearly enabled all classes to have an economic vote while keeping corporations from doing things which would keep particular classes' economic actions from making a difference in the values represented. One approach, then, might be to provide a basic income to all. In theory, this would protect consumers from being forced to buy from companies which are otherwise too big/cheap to avoid and re-create something of the situation which Alexis de Tocqueville noted in America when he said,

"the workmen have always some sure resources which enable them to refuse to work when they cannot get what they conceive to be the fair price of their labor." (Democracy in America, Vol.2, p. 189 in the Bradley edition).

Whether the theory would work out in practice is, of course, debatable.

The Good of Autonomy

It is generally good to permit people to do as they please. This is a relatively modern notion, I think. It can also become a distinctively modern idol to which we sacrifice ourselves and our children. It is, nevertheless, a genuine good. What supports this good?

Autonomy is good because it allows us to exercise our deliberative capacities. It thus enables us to express our moral point of view. Autonomy matters because autonomous decisions matter to others. If my decision has no impact whatsoever on others, then my deciding thus quite literally means nothing. So allowing autonomy is a calculated risk. We allow others to mess up in order to attain a good of self-expression.

Why is self-expression good? It is not an unmitigated good. Indeed, the expression "self-expression" is not perfectly clear. When we express ourselves, we also form ourselves. In writing this post, I do not merely express my thoughts, I also develop my thoughts. My thoughts on this topic are altered by expressing them. Before, my thoughts were a bit of a fuzz, but by writing this the thoughts come into focus or, more accurately, coalesce into an articulated form. The joints of my thoughts become, not visible, but definite and therefore visible. In deciding we define ourselves and thereby clarify for ourselves and others who we are. So self-expression is a part of self-development.

To be a self is, on my account, to be a being who can perceive and act with regard to others as others. The other elements of being a self arise from this interaction with others in culture. We absorb things from others--ideas, phrases, heuristics, rules, ways of acting and modes of thought. These varied things from varied people clash. They require synthesis into a coherent self, a self who can pursue a single life. In this synthesis, dissonances must be resolved between mind and body, body and world, mind and culture, etc., and in doing so one changes.

So to develop oneself through self-expression is to articulate how one has picked up the culture around oneself, and to present what one has picked up to other, thus to contribute to altering culture. So self-expression does two things. First, it develops culture by contributing to a re-synthesizing of its elements and thus providing more for others to pick up on. Second, it develops oneself by nailing down (often partial) resolutions to various tensions we find ourselves in.

We resolve tensions in our culture in our own persons and then hold up our answers, our lives and words, to others for them to accept or reject. If we aim to reach a solid resolution, we must accept this phase as well. Others then pick up what we say as elements of themselves, whether as useful antagonists or as allies. They think with us: by means of what we have contributed. We then pick up their developments and the cycle repeats. We hope that we are coming to a closer and closer approximation, but this can only occur by taking seriously the goods others are responding to, addressing them, and finding a place for them in a renewed culture.

Autonomy is good, then, because it helps us to resolve debates about how to live, how our culture should be understood and what it should and become. Autonomy is good because it permits exploration of ways of being and doing. It is a risk because we may go wrong. The role of autonomy is to answer questions which can be answered by seeing different ways of life, and the point of autonomy can only be preserved where opposing views are given a fair and serious hearing. Autonomy is pointless without disagreement and it is sterile without debate between opposed views. To utilize autonomy is to invite dispute regarding one's choices.

The Problem of Autonomy

If one surrenders oneself to Christ, how does one then gain oneself?
How is it that when one surrenders one's intellect to Christ, one does not cease to experience the thinking as our own? How is it that to be controlled by the love of God does not make one as a robot? (or if it does, then what, exactly, will be the supreme motivating force for us in heaven?).

These questions may be offered as problematic to the Determinist first, but they are no less problematic to a non-determinist Christian, so far as I can see. Even if it is by character formation that our wills become constrained, why bother continued existence once one no longer has a real choice? If there is any case where an actor can say to himself "well, then, I'll just wait and see what I do," then the question may be applied. If one says that we will always have a choice of how to act well, then this is still unsatisfactory: I don't care about such miniscule decisions! (as regards my recognizing myself as a separable being, not lost in some mass of unified consciousness or something--the length of time I take to order at restaurants notwithstanding.)

To be Christian is to affirm an answer to these questions. We are one body. The question these questions are getting at is, how are we yet many members? How does union with Christ not entail becoming lost in a kind of God-consciousness, such that there is no longer really a "me" to speak of? We believe there is an answer to these things. What is it? If the analogy of the Trinity is offered, this is no help, for it tries to explain that which we do not understand, yet believe as Christians to be the case with something else we... do not understand, yet believe as Christians to be the case.